You do realize that that only few in between MMO-s really "dies" so far? The biggest fail was probably Tabula Rasa. Star Wars Galaxies died becouse of licensing issues with Lucasarts. Then there was City of Heroes (?) recently. Aside from that, still many games working fine with smaller communities.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

Yes sure. I kind of ment more high profile or mainstream titles. Or at least something that I heard about I played many MMO (more than 10 I think) and from the above list most titles I never heard about. Played Star Wars Galaxies (it was a great game before NGE in my opinion) and Tabula Rasa. Heard about Asherons Call and Matrix Online also read some blog posts about Fury few years ago. As for rest I had no idea they even existed. Also from the list above the only titles which I would consider were expected to be BIG were Star Wars Galaxies and Tabula Rasa. SWG was destroyed by NGE (probably the largest MMO player exodus I am aware of) but even despite that it lasted for 8 years and died mostly becouse of licensing issues with Lucasarts. Tabula Rasa was supposed to be great (SCI FI MMO made my industry's legend Richard Garriot) but it was clear after one week that this game is just bad. I consider TR to be the biggest failure in the history of MMO. As for the rest high-profile titles, they are still alive and working well. I often bring an example of EVE Online becouse I have larger experience with it. And I can assure you that despite only 300,000 subs from which many are alts (many EVE players own multiple accounts) the game feels very alive and robust with dedicated and loyal community.

As a complete idiot when it comes to Xfire, is it reliable? If so, could you give us a link, I would like to view this.

Using Xfire as a way to judge how well a game did is a poor way to go about it. I mean seriously, you are going to go by an instant messenger system on how good a game does. An instant messenger system that only a subset of WoW players would use. I would personally wait until Blizzard comes out with a statement on sale figures.

Using Xfire as a way to judge how well a game did is a poor way to go about it. I mean seriously, you are going to go by an instant messenger system on how good a game does. An instant messenger system that only a subset of WoW players would use. I would personally wait until Blizzard comes out with a statement on sale figures.

Are you arguing that the subset of players who use Xfire is significantly biased? It could be, but in past experience with WoW vs. other games, Xfire did seem to do a reasonable job of tracking relative usage (see SWTOR, Rift, etc.)

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

Xfire results just came in and wow is not looking too good, even GW2 on opening day had over 25 000 hours more played time with a lot more launch issues.

We definitely not going to see a reverse in the decline with wow and having logged into d3 yest evening I was shocked at how empty my friends list was still.

Had the same issue. Only 4 people on my friend list are playing MoP. Out of my entire 25 man guild at the start of Cataclysm only 4 are actively playing MoP (and these are people that started in vanilla / TBC) - some are still on the fence - the rest will not return. Kind of worrying numbers. Having said that I think MoP will increase subs initially and will retain them better than Cataclysm.

it depnds when the "date of checking" is there is nearly always a large drop off of subs just before the build up to the next expac when people get bored of the final raid.

i think a better question would be how many subs will there be at MoP's peak

I don't think so. The only time this ever happened was at the end of cataclysm. BC continued to grow like crazy and WOTLK sat at its steady 11.5 mil almost its entire life. Vanilla was also in continual growth as well.

This is idiotic; how, exactly, are we supposed to know? Many things could've happened by then - maybe Blizzard's data center will be hit by a meteor. Or maybe the next patch will also include a bar of pure gold mailed to each subscriber's house. There are an almost infinite number of possibilities - are we just supposed to guess?

I agree, I also vote for 1 million. After a million gained when the only other less popular MMO at the moment dies.

I don't know if you're talking about SWTOR or GW2, but neither are going to "die". I actually think SWTOR will pick up again once it goes F2P, and GW2 was already a huge success for ANet. It takes a lot for a MMO to just "die". As long as people are playing it, no matter how many or how few, it's not dead.

Are you arguing that the subset of players who use Xfire is significantly biased? It could be, but in past experience with WoW vs. other games, Xfire did seem to do a reasonable job of tracking relative usage (see SWTOR, Rift, etc.)

Yes, yes I am. I am also arguing that xfire is only used by a small minority of the WoW community.

Really? You think no one will quit? Even if subs stay at 9 million, thats because some people quit and some people join.

You should say: "I think it will stay at 9 million."

That was exactly my point, too. Saying "0" is absurd. People will always quit for whatever reason. It may even out because of new subs, or the subs my grow, but that's because of new people joining, or resubbing.

---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 10:10 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Pancaspe

MOP is guaranteed to set a new record for subs. I expect over 15 million.

WoW will never see 15 million, sorry. Many people have moved on. It will probably see more then it had with Cata, if MoP doesn't disappoint in the months to come, but it won't get 15 million. Not even close. Even if MoP is the best thing to happen to WoW, it won't get that high.

OP tries to assert that the majority of lost subs in Wrath didn't come from ICC lasting a year.

OP tries to assert that the majority of lost subs overall didn't happen because Cataclysm started out overtuned and continued with extremely weak patches until 4.3--which began losing when it stretched into its second-nearing-third fiscal quarter and several high-profile releases hit shelves after completely stemming the flow at first.

OP tries to extrapolate, that based on player burnout from overlong content patches and a poorly-designed endgame in the following expansion, the expansion that has had an overwhelmingly-positive ingame response will cause massive sub bleeds.

Oh, his name's "Oldschoolwow." No bias here, I'm sure.

The sheer fact that we have people being so asinine as to split hairs over the exact definition of content is a sign that there isn't any worth discussing for non-raiders.